Vibe Coding for Seniors

Time to learn some new tricks

Henry James

I first got into vibe coding, sometime after I decided to translate The Wings of the Dove, by Henry James, into English.

Scholars generally hold that Henry James entered an “abstruse period” during the latter part of his life. They think the change of writing style coincided with his adoption of an amanuensis, due to a writer’s cramp that prevented him from typing himself. He would dictate to the amanuensis, who was named Theodora Bosanquet, as he paced around the room. Somehow, extreme long-windedness was the result.

I encountered this writing style first hand, when I came to pick up a copy of The Wings of the Dove. It really threw me, more than Joyce or Proust ever did, He really tied my brain in knots.

To give you a feel for what I’m talking about, here’s a typical section:

“One felt them in the room exactly as one felt the room—the hundred like it or worse—in the street. Each time she turned in again, each time, in her impatience, she gave him up, it was to sound to a deeper depth, while she tasted the faint, flat emanation of things, the failure of fortune and of honour. If she continued to wait it was really, in a manner, that she might not add the shame of fear, of individual, personal collapse, to all the other shames.”

Now that’s a singularly dense piece of writing. But in the age of the New AI, I have powerful tools to bring to bear. I asked Google Gemini 3.0 to recast that section, so that the average 15-year-old could make sense of it. Here’s what I got:

She could feel the bad vibes in the room just as clearly as she felt the crappy, run-down neighborhood outside. Every time she turned away from him, she felt even more depressed. She was surrounded by the smell of old, dusty stuff and the feeling that her family had lost all their money and their good reputation. The only reason she stayed there waiting was because she didn't want to look like a coward on top of everything else.

I didn’t want to read the whole book at that register, so I dialed it back from 15-year-old to college-educated adult:

One felt them in the room just as one felt the room—and the hundreds like it, or worse—in the street. Each time she turned back inside, each time, in her impatience, she gave up on him, she sank into a deeper despair as she experienced the faint, lifeless atmosphere of things, the failure of fortune and of honor. If she continued to wait, it was really, in a way, to avoid adding the shame of fear, of personal collapse, to all the other shames.

My appetite whetted, I now wanted to go ahead and translate the entire book. And after that, whatever other classics struck my fancy. I figured it didn’t matter whether they were arcane versions of English, or classics written in foreign languages. If I could locate the .epub file, I could take it on.

In all cases my goal would be to eventually kick away the training wheels and ride around on the originals. And who knows? Maybe others would find these sorts of literary companions useful.

Andrej Karpathy

If you are a coder, or an ex coder, or married to one, you may guess where this is going. What if I created some sort of app that could automate the production of these translations, working it’s way through an entire book? I stayed up quite late one evening, doing the first couple of chapters, by hand, from the chat window, but it was time to automate. I have been tempted for a while to try using Google Gemini from the programming level, and here was a perfect reason to get into it.

This is not my first rodeo, ie, the process of staying up way too late at night, painstakingly piecing together the code to implement such a project. You begin with a rough feel for how to accomplish a task, using Google API’s and libraries, and after hours and hours of trying things, getting roadblocked, posting questions on Stack Overflow, maybe you create a useful tool. But that was how we did things before the New AI.

Enter Andrej Karpathy. He was championing a new style of programming , which seemed perfect for are retired coder like me, who’d prefer not to break a sweat. I was drawn by the same sort of impulse that causes an old sailor to purchase his first motor cruiser. It can get you to the same place, and avoid all that heavy lifting.

Andrej has foundational AI credentials, and he is an epic hacker, to boot. Early on, he taught one of the more popular AI courses at Stanford, and went on to help found Open AI. But best of all, he has a passion for communication complex technical ideas. Through his lectures, posts and interviews, he has been an inspiration to many, at all levels. In his spare time, he takes on personal passion projects like implementing a working LLM system in as few lines of code as possible.

Vibe Coding

In the following landmark post, Andrej coined the term “vibe coding”. It’s a post that should go down in history.

I don’t know what it is about this quote that I find so appealing. I mean, for a couple of years now, people have been talking about using systems like Code Pilot for boosting programmer productivity, but somehow, this passage conveys an image of just sitting back and saying to the machine, “Ok, your’e so smart. Why don’t you just go head and code this up for me?” And when inevitable errors pop up, maintaining that chill vibe and just pasting the error messages back at the LLM, and essentially saying “Deal with it, my machine buddy”.

Andrej is a fit, fairly young guy, but somehow I have an image of him laying on his side, on the couch, and dictating to the computer. Maybe I’m just projecting, but as a guy who’s recently developed a habit of taking afternoon naps, this vibe coding approach really resonates.

This world-class coder freely elects to put his considerable talents aside, and let the AI do the driving. To me, it’s a supreme act of Zen detachment, to just say to the computer, “Here you do it”. A pre-emptive surrender of ego. I find it very classy.

What’s the Senior Citizen Angle Here ?

We’re all staring down our own mortality, but maybe some more than others. We are being offered a magic wand, to aid in extending our creative longevity. I say we should go ahead and grab it, and in a Harry Plotter fashion, exclaim:

“Incipiat opus” !

or some other suitable Latin-sounding phrase.

My Dad sat in front of his computer until he really lost his cognitive juice, at the very end. I bet he would have had some fun, vibe coding. I wonder what kinds of features he would have implemented.

I don’t want to underplay the complexity of implementing literary training wheels. I still probably spend more time at it than I should, but I’ll be sure to make the fruits of my labor public.

As long as I keep at this project, I vow to maintain a chill mental state. Whenever I feel myself getting sucked into some dark programming hole, I’ll always ask,

“What would Andrej do?”

And in my daily life, when family and friends throw me a thorny technical issue, I won’t even let my blood pressure raise. I’ll just take a picture of whatever it is, and let Gemini take the wheel.

Is Vibe Coding for Everybody?

I’m torn about whether I should advocate vibe coding for everybody. I have a friend who was attempting to have ChatGPT help him set up something simple on his Mac, like a system-wide font change, and hours later, he had wedged himself so badly that he needed to restore the entire operating system.

And I had an instance where I was trying to install and setup a source control tool called Magit, in my Emacs environment, which led to Gemini and I going on a wild manic ride that went nowhere, except deeper and deeper into a realm of unreality. To let you know how bad it got, it was Gemini, the eternal optimist, who eventually said, “Hey, Boss. How about if we just don’t do this ?” In that case, putting me and the computer to bed for the night did the trick, The next day, I was able to see the problem with fresh eyes, and like a seasoned equestrian, keep a firm enough hand on the reins that the little filly didn’t dig herself into a ditch again,

I suppose my advice is: Don’t attempt a project that is so far beyond you that you are just blindly following the AI, not understanding anything it is doing. You need to know enough to see when things are going off in a fruitless direction,

Postscript

Coding for me now is still a time sink, but an infinitely less stressful one. I feel enormously fortunate that I can live in these times, and implement things I never could have before. All for the modest price of my Gemini license, I have access to text summaries, translations into different languages, and text to speech capabilities.

So yes, I can translate Henry James into English. I can also setup an environment for reading Dante’s Inferno, in the original Italian, with my custom build reader’s companion right there with me. Behind this, I plan on getting into Don Quijote, and works by Chaucer, Proust. How ironic I am using these modern tools to help me unlock the classics.

I am all in on vibe coding. May I have the self control to push away from the table, every so often, and go sailing.